A Quick Guide to Organizing Your Home (Part 2 of 2)

Yesterday, we outlined a few tips on how to organize your home’s common spaces—the foyer, the kitchen, and the living room. Today, we’ll cover room organization tips for the rest of the house, including the difficult-to-tame garage.

The Bedroom

Bedroom clutter often centers around the closet, so begin by focusing your energy there. A seasonal wardrobe assessment will help you pare down the number of clothing items that need to be stored. Be ruthless—if you haven’t worn it in a year, you probably never will. Develop a closet organizing system that works for you, and stick with it. It may make the most sense to you to have your clothes grouped together by color; another popular organizational strategy is hanging clothing together by fabric weight.

Declutter the rest of the room by using some of the same strategies that you used in the living room. Dividers will keep the contents of dresser drawers in order. Use bins, baskets, and boxes to store items that don’t see daily use, and get creative with hooks and shelving to keep small items—jewelry, handbags, and other accessories—from taking over your entire dresser top.

The Bathroom

A cluttered bathroom can extend a morning or evening routine and make getting anywhere on time a challenge. The key to organizing a bathroom is ensuring that the items you use on a daily basis are easily accessible. Everything else should be hidden away. Throw away any expired items—cosmetics, medications, and sunscreen all have finite shelf lives. Use available wall space for shelves to store extra towels and toiletries, and keep hair accessories, makeup brushes, and other small items in bowls, boxes, or caddies to prevent them from rattling around in a drawer. If you’re short on space in the bathroom, you may have to get creative to find adequate storage spots, but with an open mind and careful planning, it can be done.

The Garage

Much like kitchen clutter, garage clutter can become overwhelming in a short period of time. If you can, plan to devote an entire weekend to getting the garage in order. If that’s simply not an option, tackle the space in stages or contact a Best Pick closet and garage organizer for help.

Because items tend to accumulate in layers in a garage, the most efficient way to begin is removing everything from the room to get a clear sense of what needs to be stored and what can be sold or donated. If you don’t have any wall shelving or cabinetry, installing some simple shelves should be your first priority. Most hardware and home stores sell wall racks with movable hooks and other attachments for storing brooms, rakes, and other lawn tools. If every item has a designated storage spot, keeping the garage organized on an ongoing basis will be less of a chore.

Organizing an entire home is a big job, but breaking the task down room by room makes it much more manageable. Once each room is organized to your satisfaction, a brief sweep of the house to pick up any misplaced odds and ends at the end of the day will help maintain order. Decide which room you’d like to begin with in your organizing journey, and use our guide to help you work through the rest of the house.